1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing system, and a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there is already known a distributed printing technology to distribute printing of multiple pages of originals to a plurality of multifunction peripherals (MFPs) connected to a network to increase the print speed.
However, in the conventional distributed printing technology, if MFPs used in distributed printing are not uniform in specs, there is a program that it is troublesome to merge printed sheets collected from the MFPs in the same direction. For example, in a case of a mixture of a face-up discharge type of MFP which discharges a printed sheet with the printed side up and a face-down discharge type of MFP which discharges a printed sheet with the printed side down or a case of a mixture of an MFP equipped with a nonvolatile memory such as an HDD for storing image data to be printed and an MFP equipped with no nonvolatile memory, the printed side of printed sheets or the printing order is not unified.
To cope with this problem, there is proposed a method to conform the order of pages of printed sheets to the order of pages of originals if multiple types of copiers or scanners are connected to a network and they differ in a discharge function and an original scanning function (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-53789). Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-53789 discloses a method to determine the read order of an image reading unit and select face-down discharge if the image reading unit reads images of originals from the first page or face-up discharge if the image reading unit reads images of originals from the last page.
However, the technology disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2009-53789 is based on the premise that one device performs printing, so in a case of distributed printing with a plurality of devices, the printed side or the printing order cannot be unified.